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First performance anxiety is the absolute worst.
Category:Fanfic Category:Creepypasta The stress of the first performance of the year always gets to people. I've been a choreographer for the majority of my adult life, which means I've seen every single variation of pre-show nerves. Kids have cried at me, screamed at me, vomited on my shoes, and one time tried to punch me square in the jaw in the moments before they were supposed to go on. It makes sense; the nature of fragile teenage egos is unavoidable. In all my life, however, I've never seen a reaction quite like last night. Over the past few months, I had been teaching a group of 14 to 18 year old ballet students. These weren't my greenhorns; they were experienced, with years of work under their belts. Most had been coming to the studio I worked at for their entire childhoods, and they were capable of things I could never have done, even at their age. Even in a class of skilled dancers, however, there is always at least one that towers above the rest, and in this cadre it was Laurie. Laurie was a prodigy; her parents had signed her up for ballet lessons at age four, and she'd barely taken her shoes off since. She'd had trouble fitting in at first. Laurie was shy and withdrawn, and had some trouble being a near-silent wallflower in a sea of gregarious theatre kids. Despite this, her skill and dedication had earned her a comfortable position in the social hierarchy; Laurie was exempt from the usual teenage antics and cruelty that people her age were wont to do. She was my project, and I'd spent years of my life working with her. This year was going to be Laurie's last. At age eighteen, she was on the verge of aging out of our youth-focused studio, and was probably going to move to another, more adult program. Because of this, I wanted our last dance with her at the end of the year recital to be our most impressive yet. I spent weeks at my desk, thinking up different concepts and ideas to base choreography around, and spent several sleepless nights twirling on my own, coming up with the perfect routine. At the same time, though it pains me to admit it in retrospect, I worked my students to the bone. We went overtime again and again, held extra classes, tried to cram techniques that would take years to perform reliably into the span of a few hours. One of our sessions led to one of the less experienced dancers breaking their ankle, and instead of waiting for them to recover, I'd simply sidelined them and continued choreographing without them. I wanted this to be perfect, and I'd assumed everyone else had as well. I thought that a little suffering was worth it for the chance to end Laurie's career with us with a bang. I wish I had paid more attention to how she had felt. In the week leading up to the recital, Laurie's behaviour had begun to change, though as wrapped up in my own delusions of grandeur as I was, I didn't notice in the slightest until after the fact. Though she had never been the most outgoing person, what little sociability she had seemed to completely wither. When she wasn't dancing, she would be sitting ramrod still backstage, staring daggers at the drywall. Her arrivals became more and more tardy, with no excuse given beyond a muttered apology. Her classmates came up to me when she wasn't around, asking me to check on her; I heard stories of her speaking under her breath to herself, of her coming out of the washroom with running mascara, of her itching at her arms until they were red and inflamed. In my hubris, I dismissed it all. I figured that it was just a simple case of anxiety, that it would clear up come opening night. In a way, it did. The night of our first show was tense. Our entire class had taken years off our collective lives in order to polish the act completely before the first run. At least one of the students had a crying fit in the washroom that had been audible through the walls, and I myself felt rather nauseous. Laurie, however, had seemingly had a complete recovery from her previous affliction; her hair was perfect, she'd made a few muted jokes to lighten the mood, and at one point I swore she had even smiled. I felt vindicated. There seemed to be nothing that a love of ballet could not overcome. As the final hour approached, I led one final runthrough of our choreography, had a tearful group hug with my students, then went up to my seat in the audience and waited. I grinned in giddy anticipation as the lights went down and the curtain opened, and barely resisted the urge to whoop and cheer as my dancers made their way onstage. As their number began, however, I felt my smile fade from my face. The choreography was absolutely perfect, with not a single pirouette being missed, but their movements simply looked wrong. Their limbs moved like they were being pulled by strings, hanging limply when not in use and being painfully rigid when they were. At several points, they seemed to bend further than I had ever thought manageable, even for flexible teenagers, and their fearful, agonized expressions seemed to agree with me. I thought that maybe the stress of performing such complex maneuvers in public had gotten to them, and that they were overcompensating. The first audible snap, however, immediately proved me wrong. Starting in my seat, I looked around me to see what had caused such a violent noise, coming up with nothing. As I turned back to the stage, the explanation became shockingly clear; a shard of white could be seen sticking out of the leg of one of my students, with a dark red stain on their tights growing larger by the second. Horrified, I attempted to run down to the stage to get them to the hospital, only to find myself completely frozen. Nothing except my neck would respond. I tried to shout, but my mouth simply refused to open. I looked around at the audience, only to find a sea of people sharing my fate. The injured dancer seemed to be in the same predicament; though their eyes were bulging out of their sockets, and tears were running down their face, they continued to dance, even as the bone protruding from their thigh twisted and cracked. Standing alone with an injury like that should have been impossible, yet they spun with seeming ease. I felt the urge to vomit crawling up my throat as they gracefully landed in the arms of their partner. Their partner, digging their nails into their arm with casual ease, then tore open their bicep. At this point, I began to black out, from both fear and nausea. Every time my awareness would return, I would see another atrocity: a dancer digging her fingers into another's eyes, one of my favourite students breaking his nails as he clawed at the chest of his best friend; there was too much for me to register in my brief moments of lucidity. What stuck out to me through it all, however, was Laurie. At the beginning of the routine, her movements had been as fluid as they ever had been, her poise being the same as it ever was. Even as her fellow students tore each other to pieces, she continued the performance, her concentration seemingly never wavering for a second. She was unharmed, with only a few splatters of blood on her costume showing that she wasn't completely immune to the chaos. As the music faded away, and most of my students lay dying or dead among the viscera, I began to regain true consciousness, gaping at the scene in front of me. In the middle of it all stood Laurie, staring at the ground with an unreadable expression. Near total silence fell throughout the theatre, with the only sound being her ragged, exhausted breathing. In a sudden burst of movement, Laurie straightened up, and seemed to look directly into my eyes, unblinkingly. Hers looked ancient, hollow; an aged spectre staring at me from out of a person I had thought of as my own flesh and blood. I could see pain, exhaustion, and and heartbreak in them, but also a note of triumph and finality. For a single moment, her expression changed, and she gave me the largest grin I had ever seen on her normally stoic face. Then she raised both of her hands to her throat, and tore it out with her nails. With Laurie's end, whatever force keeping me and the rest of the audience in our chairs faded, and screams filled the air. The paramedics arrived shortly after, but at that point there was no one left to save. I spent the rest of the night in the cold outside the theatre, staring with an unfocused gaze as they slowly brought out what was left of my class in body bags. Laurie's corpse was last; I swear she still had that same smile as the zipper closed. The studio collapsed, for obvious reasons. I got hired elsewhere relatively quickly, likely out of sympathy, but my heart isn't into it anymore. Whenever I sit at home and try to plan out a routine, all I can see is Laurie's face, staring out at me from an empty, red-stained stage.